Narrative as Virtual Reality

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Introduction

This book argues that there has been a growing trend toward participatory experiences with media, first with painting, then with literature, and now continued in imaginings about the technological possibilities of virtual reality: “The history of Western art has seen the rise and fall of immersive ideals, and their displacement, n the twentieth century, by an aesthetics of play and self-reflexivity that eventually produced the ideal of an active participation of the appreciator – reader, spectator, user – in the production of the text. This scenario affects both visual and literary art, though the immersive wave peaked earlier in painting than in literature” (2).

Yet now participatory literature has reached its inevitable conclusion in the imminently participatory hypertext form, about which Ryan says, “this relative freedom has been hailed as an allegory of the vastly more creative and less constrained activity of reading as meaning formation” (6). Hypertext is a product of its time, i.e. of the postmodern approach, of which cyberspace is also participant: “The device also favors a typically postmodern approach to writing closely related to what has been described by Lévi-Strauss as bricolage (tinkering, in Sherry Turkle’s translation). In this mode of composition, as Turkle describes it (Life on the Screen, 50-73), the writer does not adopt a ‘top-down’ method, starting with a given idea and breaking it down into constituents, but proceeds ‘bottom-up’ by fitting together reasonably autonomous fragments, the verbal equivalent of objets trouvés, into an artifact whose shape and meaning(s) emerge through the linking process. The result is a patchwork, a collage of disparate elements, which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called a ‘mechanic assemblage’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 332-35)” (7).

With undeniable postmodern influences, both hypertext and cyberspace are a reaction against postmodernism, what I would call post-postmodernism, for lack of a better phrase: “Building interactivity into the object of a theoretical mystique, the ‘founding fathers’ of hypertext theory promoted the new genre as an instrument of liberation from some of the most notorious bêtes noires of postmodern thought: linear logic, logocentrism, arborescent hierarchical structures, and repressive forms of power. George Landow writes, for instance, that hypertext embodies the ideal of a nonhierarchical, decentered, fundamentally democratic political system that promotes ‘a dialogic mode of collective endeavor’ (Hypertext 2.0, 283)” (8). The important point is that, like with Wertheim’s book, Ryan’s explicates the production of a worldview, of which our relation to and understanding of cyberspace is but a part.

Ryan is not a huge fan of hypertext as a medium, and would likely agree with the ‘agnostics’ she refers to: “To the skeptical observer, the accession of the reader to the role of writer – or ‘wreader,’ as some agnostics facetiously call the new role – is a self-serving metaphor that presents hypertext as a magic elixir: ‘Read me, and you will receive the gift of literary creativity’” (9). This passage in particular reminded me of the emphasis on “mass creativity” in the world of technology (Internet technology in particular). Everyone is creative! Everyone’s creativity must be enabled! This was not always the case, and being such, we must recognize the historical situation of this belief and then question its unassailability.

In fact, more importantly, the utopian vision of the “freedom” that such a medium enables is, I would argue, the same illusory freedom people believe they will find in the Internet. As Foucault reminds us (in the words of Ryan): “aesthetic pleasure, like political harmony, is a matter not of unbridled license but of controlled freedom” (9). It’s silly to think that hypertext equals complete freedom; you are still constrained by the links, and those made possible by the author. Similarly, we are much more bounded by the Internet than we claim to be, fooled by the propaganda about its liberating potential. But this is not to say that I think we should strive for complete freedom! Freedom is only meaningful if it is freedom for something (rather than reactive, freedom from something). I simply wish to point out firstly that we are not as free as we think we are in cyberspace, and secondly that it is worthwhile challenging the wisdom of “freedom” as an end in itself.

Another crucial bit of this Ryan book has to do with what we mean when we say “virtual reality”. Ryan says, “I have suggested here three distinct sense of virtual: an optical one (the virtual as illusion), a scholastic one (the virtual as potentiality), and an informal technological one (the virtual as the computer-mediated)” (13). The first of these can be traced from signification to simulation: “In pre-Renaissance times painting was more a symbolic representation of the spiritual essence of things than an attempt to convey the illusion of their presence. Its semiotic mode was signification rather than simulation” (2).

For Ryan, this is an important issue: “On the shiny surface of signs – the signifier – there is no room for bodies of either the actual or the virtual variety. But the recipient of total art, if we dare to dream such a thing, should be no less than the subject as Ignatius of Loyola defined it an ‘indivisible compound’ of mind and body. What is at stake in the synthesis of immersion and interactivity is therefore nothing less than the participation of the whole of the individual in the artistic experience” (21). We shall see in later chapters that immersion is the goal of all art, shared with VR technology; participation has become a goal of both; and utopian visioning about art and literature is not dissimilar from that of technology.